Being a successful photographer requires more than just taking great photos.

Even some of the most talented photographers never get their big break because their work is simply not seen. One of the best business decisions a photographer can make is to maximize their public exposure; and one of the easiest places to start is through establishing a strong social media presence.

With some art galleries using platforms such as Instagram to source new artists more and more, it’s an important place to show your best work.

If you’re new to using social media for business, the various platforms (and their related strategies) may all seem a bit daunting. That’s why we decided to share a few of our social media secrets to help you navigate and master the game of likes, followers, re-pins, and retweets.

5 Tools to Help Photographers Win at Social

The best tool for mobile photography

As a photographer on social media, there are a few key qualities your social profiles need to have in order to attract the right audience and promote community engagement. The first, and most important, is the images themselves. And for this, we recommend using a premium iPhone photography app like Filmborn.

Filmborn is a powerful, easy-to-use camera and photo editor, designed to be the best photography app for the iPhone.

Filmborn

Cost: $2.99 with additional in-app purchases

Use: Taking & editing photos

Best for: Instagram, All mobile profiles

Platform: iPhone app

Filmborn is an iPhone hybrid photography app that allows you to elevate your digital photography to a level previously only attainable with film. It helps you build a consistent portfolio, and recreate the look of analog photography through true-to-film presets. Giving you a catalog of films, lenses, and darkroom options on an intuitive interface, you are able to replicate the look of traditional film quickly and conveniently on your iPhone.

Tools for scheduling social media posts

Rather than spending hours each day posting photos and maintaining your profile activity in real-time, there are tools that make it easy to schedule posts in advance, so that you can plan ahead and focus on the bigger picture while keeping your fans engaged. A social profile is an online public portfolio that benefits from being thoughtfully designed.

Later

Cost: Tiered pricing.

Use: Post scheduling, photo curating, design

Best for: Instagram

Platform: Mobile & desktop app

Later is a desktop and mobile app that stores and schedules Instagram posts.

With Later, you can create an organized, labeled, centralized folder of photos and content to be posted on your social media channels. From the desktop app, you can quickly and easily write captions (rather than typing on an iPhone) and search for content that you want to share based on hashtags, user profiles, or even photos you’ve liked on Instagram.

Later gives you the ability to easily search and repost relevant content in your community to boost engagement, and to design an Instagram feed that best represents your brand through photo scheduling. Once you schedule posts, you can preview your grid and easily rearrange your posts by dragging and dropping on the calendar.

With additional tools that help turn engaged customers into paying ones, Later is a curating, previewing, and scheduling tool that is ideal for Instagram.

Buffer

Cost: Free account, tiered pricing options.

Use: Post scheduling

Best for: Facebook, Twitter

Platform: Web, mobile app

Buffer is a post-scheduling app that is ideal for Facebook and Twitter. It has an easy-to-use design that allows you to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts with the ability to post the same content across both platforms with just one click.

Buffer also generates short links for Twitter, freeing up more characters for text. In addition, Buffer gives you insight into how each post is performing, and even generates big-picture analytics by the week, month, or year. Accessible on mobile and web, Buffer is a convenient way to stay active on Facebook and Twitter.

A tool for finding photography hashtags

Now that your feed is exactly how you want it, it’s time to show it off. One of the easiest and simplest ways to drive traffic to your public profiles is to use hashtags. Hashtags act as a connection between users. Without them, the only audience your photos will have is your immediate group of followers. That is why it’s important to find out the best hashtags for your brand.

FocalMark

Cost: Free

Use: Hashtags

Best for: Instagram

Platform: Mobile app

FocalMark is a hashtag generator that uses an algorithm to identify the best hashtags for different types of photography. After selecting the genre and location of your photo, FocalMark gives you a list of relevant hashtags for your images, making it easy for you to copy and paste hashtags onto your Instagram posts without having to do hours of research.

A tool for monitoring your social media channels

Once you have all your profiles designed, hash-tagged and scheduled out in advance, you’ll begin to see an increase in audience engagement. Juggling conversations on one or more social media profiles can be difficult and take a lot of time and organization, but AgoraPulse makes it easy.

AgoraPulse

Cost: Free trial, tiered pricing.

Use: Social media monitoring

Best for: All profiles

Platform: Web

AgoraPulse aggregates all of your social media accounts onto one centralized dashboard, making it hard to miss a tweet, comment, or message. Its features include: scheduling posts, managing conversations across social media accounts, profile monitoring, and analytics reports. With certain paid accounts, you can also create quizzes and contests to drive audience engagement.

For photographers, social media does not have to be a time consuming marketing tool, but rather an efficient way to attract potential customers, peers, influencers, and mentors to your work. These are some of the best tools we’ve found to help photographers maximize their efforts and make the most of their online social media presence.

What do you think of these tools? What other strategies, tools, and techniques do you use to win at social media? Let us know in our private Facebook Group.

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